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The American Prospect - articles by authorenSmooth Operatorhttp://prospect.org/article/smooth-operator-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Kathryn McGarr's new biography of Robert Strauss -- Democratic macher, superlawyer, and certified D.C. Wise Man -- could not be more timely. Since the tea-stained Republican takeover of the House and return of government gridlock, Washington pundits have been dreaming of an old-style bipartisan deal-maker who can bring political adversaries to the table and hash out difficult compromises in private. <i>The Whole Damn Deal: Robert Strauss and the Art of Politics</i> is an admiring portrayal of Strauss's career that reminds us how Washington used to work, but it illustrates, albeit inadvertently, the limitations of the idealized deal-maker as white knight and why the nostalgia for that Beltway type is misconceived today.</p>
<p>Strauss's life justifies a book-length treatment. Born in 1918 to middle-class Jews and raised in West Texas, Strauss rose to become chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and to play a series of Mr. Fix-It roles in government -- as special trade representative, then inflation czar, then Middle East peace negotiator in the Carter administration; as a mainstay on blue-ribbon commissions during the Reagan years; and as ambassador to the Soviet Union (and then Russia) under George H.W. Bush. As a young lawyer, Strauss began his career at the Federal Bureau of Investigation before starting a law practice in 1940s Dallas. He then gained prominence in state Democratic circles through his role as a chief fundraiser and adviser to his friend John Connally, elected governor in 1962. His association with Connally in turn brought Strauss into the orbit of Lyndon Johnson and the DNC, where he served as treasurer beginning in 1970.</p>
<p>In the volatile aftermath of the McGovern electoral catastrophe of 1972, Strauss took the reins as party chairman, pulling off the impressive feat of adjudicating factional squabbles while shepherding a process of continued institutional reform. Perhaps his most important role, however, occurred during the following decades, when amid his rotations in government, Strauss became a leader of Beltway influence peddling, building his law firm -- now called Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer &amp; Feld -- into one of the preeminent lobbying shops in Washington. A retired widower in his nineties, Strauss still maintains an office at the firm's Dupont Circle headquarters in a building that bears his name.</p>
<p>Contrary to the critics of insider influence, McGarr insists that Strauss's career has a lofty significance. "Strauss," she writes, "has become a symbol of a bygone era of civilized politics when Republicans and Democrats worked together to get things done, when they could do so without fear of retribution by their constituents. ... Strauss was able to pull people together, regardless of their politics, to make government work." The book's implicit promise is to offer an examination of this lost American art of political compromise.</p>
<p>McGarr's prose is lively and her research thorough. She has a knack for well-chosen anecdotes and vividly captures Strauss's personal qualities. A relentless and cheerful self -- promoter, Strauss cultivated the kind of outsized personality that's catnip for biographers -- zesty high living, Zelig-like ubiquity, a quip for every occasion. It's a credit to McGarr that the infectious bonhomie of her subject is made palpable to the reader.</p>
<p>In her introduction, McGarr reveals a fact that her publisher's marketing material somehow overlooks: Strauss is her great-uncle, and she's known him since she was a child. Despite this familial connection, the book only occasionally lapses into the rose-colored gauziness common to memoirs. The problem is less that the book is a whitewash than that it shares some of its subject's own blind spots.</p>
<p>At one point, McGarr quotes another former DNC chair, Don Fowler, to underline her theme: "[Strauss's] life is a terrific case study for what makes politics work in the United States." If Fowler's right, what "makes politics work" has had everything to do with pragmatic backroom deals hashed out among political elites and nothing at all to do with ideology, policy commitments, competing agendas, or popular mobilization.</p>
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<p><span class="dc">S</span>trauss's lack of interest in policy and principle appears to have been complete, and <i>The Whole Damn Deal</i> emulates its subject all too well in this respect. Strauss moved through one political milieu after another that was wracked by intense conflicts of interest and ideology, but McGarr's focus on his conviction-free gamesmanship obscures the larger political significance of those battles.</p>
<p>When Strauss got his start in Texas Democratic politics in the 1950s, for example, the state party was bitterly divided between conservative segregationists aligned with Governor Allan Shivers and moderates loyal to the national party. The feud sparked repeated credentials fights among competing delegations at national conventions, long before the more famous intraparty fracases of 1968. McGarr mentions Shivers once but leaves it unclear where Strauss stood vis-a-vis these divisions or on the larger struggle over civil rights.</p>
<p>When her narrative reaches the early 1970s, McGarr devotes ample space to the warfare at the DNC between New Politics liberals and an odd-bedfellow alliance of labor leaders, machine politicians, and Southern conservatives. The book shows how Strauss's pragmatic instincts and penchant for mediation helped to cool tensions without alienating either side, but the reader has little sense of the competing visions underlying the fights, nor of the significance of the party reforms initiated in the wake of 1968 but consolidated under Strauss's chairmanship.</p>
<p>Strauss himself didn't seem to care all that much about the issues of the time. McGarr recounts an amusing moment at a 1976 Platform Committee hearing when he whispered into the ear of one earnest, policy-oriented DNC staffer, "Mike, you love this shit, don't you? You just love these damn <i>iss</i>ues." Meanwhile, the mobilization of the Republican right in the 1970s and 1980s to a position of dominance within the GOP and vanguard militancy in Washington seems to interest McGarr as little as it did Strauss.</p>
<p>You can't, however, understand why Strauss types are harder to come by these days without understanding the forces that restructured national politics into a contest between two ideologically sorted, partisan armies. Strauss operated during a transitional period when Southern realignment, the decay of older party structures, and the infusion of new issues and energies into national politics gradually transformed Washington into a less hospitable place for his brand of nonideological deal-making. When conservative forces began playing for keeps, Beltway establishment figures like Strauss were unprepared to deal with them. By treating movement conservatives no differently from more centrist Republicans, that establishment helped as much to legitimize the rightward shift of politics as it did to moderate it.</p>
<p>Of course, Strauss got more than a satiated ego out of his status as an iconic D.C. insider -- he also got rich. McGarr points out that major Washington law firms lacked lobbying arms before the 1970s innovations of Akin, Gump and its rival Patton, Boggs. For Strauss's firm, the path to legislative lobbying for hire began with its booming regulatory practice during the Nixon administration's imposition of wage and price controls. Akin, Gump's direct lobbying operations expanded under the stewardship of Joel Jankowsky, while Strauss, though never a registered lobbyist himself, drew clients to the firm by cultivating his mystique as a Beltway power player.</p>
<p>To some extent, Strauss's Wise Man persona was a performance mounted on behalf of his firm's bottom line and indulged by a willing Washington political and media establishment. In a brilliant, brutal 1988 skewering in <i>The Washington Post</i>, Michael Kinsley explained the Strauss business model: "What Strauss really sells to outsider presidents like Carter and Reagan (payment in ego) and to corporate clients (payment in cash) is Washington's blessing."</p>
<p>McGarr has persuaded me that Kinsley's cynical take doesn't capture the whole truth about Strauss's career. But Kinsley was not far off the mark. Politics requires compromise, compromise depends on skilled deal-makers, and it's understandable that the trench warfare of the modern capital would induce nostalgia for the likes of Bob Strauss. But no Wise Man of Washington will be its savior. With the sorting of the parties into hostile ideological camps, the basis of the old pragmatic elite bargaining across party lines has disappeared. Some elements of that faded political culture are to be missed, but much of it -- the clubby elitism, the substantive shallowness, the aiding and abetting of corporate lobbies -- hardly seems worthy of celebration. The old Strauss waltz is finished, and we shouldn't try dancing to it again.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:31:00 +0000207683 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldA Long-Distance Runnerhttp://prospect.org/article/long-distance-runner-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>If the name Joseph L. Rauh Jr. doesn't ring any bells for you, don't feel too guilty. In the nearly six decades he toiled as a liberal political activist and lawyer in Washington, D.C., Rauh (rhymes with "brow") never wrote a book or carved out much of a public persona. But the longevity and ubiquity of his presence and the sheer breadth of his accomplishments make him a nearly singular figure in modern American political history. Encompassing New Deal regulatory battles, crusades on behalf of civil rights and civil liberties, an encyclopedic array of advocacy organizations, and ceaseless struggles in union halls, congressional chambers, and party convention floors over the years, Joe Rauh's biography is the story of 20th-century liberalism. Thankfully, Michael E. Parrish has now produced a book worthy of its subject. Anyone holding this magazine would likely profit from reading his account of one of liberalism's unsung MVPs.</p>
<p>Rauh's career almost defies summary, but here's a try: Raised in a prosperous Jewish family in Cincinnati, Rauh set off for Harvard in 1928. Soon enough, he joined law professor Felix Frankfurter's network of D.C.-bound proteges -- part of that "plague of young lawyers," in the words of one early New Dealer, who would swarm the executive branch under Franklin D. Roosevelt to man the new administrative state. In the later 1930s and 1940s, Rauh provided key legal and organizational spadework for the National Power Policy Committee and the Federal Communications Commission, set guidelines for enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act, and drafted the executive order establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee. He was, in Parrish's words, "one of the New Deals' emergency firemen, someone who changed offices and assignments as often as he changed clothes," and he alternated that work with stints clerking in the Supreme Court for Benjamin Cardozo and Frankfurter, who by that time was serving as an associate justice.</p>
<p>Then Rauh left government work behind, building an extraordinary postwar career as one of the great liberal agitators in Washington -- an outsider's insider. A co-founder and longtime leader of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), he served as Washington counsel for Walter Reuther's United Auto Workers, a charmed arrangement by which the great union provided the steady income to Rauh's law firm that subsidized its extensive pro bono work.</p>
<p>That work's initial focus was opposing McCarthyism. Parrish, whose background is in legal history, dramatizes with particular skill these high-stakes battles over Harry S. Truman's loyalty board and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Rauh defended luminaries such as Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller (Marilyn Monroe also makes a charming, surreal cameo in the narrative) as well as countless ordinary citizens caught in the vortex of the Red Scare.</p>
<p>Rauh's civil-libertarian efforts were matched only by his work as a linchpin activist and counsel for such key civil-rights organizations as the NAACP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. After years of advocacy and wrangling, Rauh took a direct role, at the highest levels of government, in helping to draft and shepherd to passage the major civil-rights legislation of the 1960s. That Rauh's unlikely partner in this was an old ADA bete noire from the previous decade, Lyndon Johnson, only vindicated his efforts: It was Johnson who had moved toward Rauh's position on civil rights, and not the reverse.</p>
<p>Rauh also sustained a mischievous side career as the postwar Democratic Party's most persistent and troublemaking conventioneer. He helped engineer the stunning adoption in 1948 of a liberal minority plank on civil rights (a platform fight that launched Hubert Humphrey's national career), took a lead role in the 1960 drafting of the most liberal major-party platform in American history up to that point, and proposed the establishment of a "peace caucus" to push for an anti-Vietnam War plank at the 1968 Chicago convention.</p>
<p>Rauh understood better than most the significance of such efforts, easily dismissible as sideshows given that party platforms were nonbinding and usually boilerplate. His insight was that convention platform fights could serve as a stage for productive conflict, a way to <i>dramatize</i> factional and ideological struggles within the party, and that the outcome of those struggles could indeed have important real-world political consequences.</p>
<p>Rauh's most momentous act of Democratic Convention agitation came in 1964, when he served as counsel for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an alternative slate of party delegates challenging the credentials of the state's racist (and Goldwater-supporting) regulars. After days of high-wire struggle, the Johnson administration forces pushed through a tepid compromise proposal that the MFDP rank and file fatefully interpreted as a betrayal by establishment whites. Rauh, by contrast, saw it as an important if partial victory that brought the party one step closer to righteousness on civil rights, and he lost no time in jumping back into the fray to push still further.</p>
<p>It's that indomitable pluck that is most striking about Rauh. During a half-century of intra-liberal and intra-Democratic struggle, he seems to have never succumbed to either complacency or despair. Every success was provisional, but so was every failure, and no conflict with an ally could amount to a final, irrevocable rupture. That may explain how, when the crack-ups of the 1960s and adverse political currents helped usher in a new, tougher era for liberalism, Rauh found it easier than many compatriots to carry on the unfashionable work of principled progressive advocacy.</p>
<p>A proud McGovernite in 1972 and Ted Kennedy delegate eight years later, Rauh divided much of his time in the 1970s and 1980s between Supreme Court confirmation fights and pathbreaking legal work for laborers involved in union democracy campaigns. (In a work that is generally not analytically driven, Parrish does include an intriguingly revisionist argument about the origins and legacy of the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, a seemingly anti-labor piece of legislation that Rauh helped to modify prior to passage and, decades later, utilized on behalf of union dissidents.) He died of a heart attack in September of 1992 -- just missing the opportunity to fight for (and with) another Democratic president.</p>
<p><i>Citizen Rauh</i> is not a perfect book. Distractingly typo-riddled, it shows signs of hasty editing, and overall it lacks both the psychological acuity and intellectual depth found in standouts of its genre, like William Chafe's biography of Allard Lowenstein, <i>Never Stop Running</i>. Moreover, though Parrish writes with verve and lucidity, his account suffers at times from a laundry-list, episodic quality -- perhaps an unavoidable consequence of covering the full array of Rauh's activities.</p>
<p>Still, even when the big picture gets obscured, Parrish excels at distilling the ins and outs of each small battle, and he vividly conveys the sheer <i>joy</i> Rauh took in entering the trenches, year after year. It's inspiring to see that a life lived fully in the service of justice and progress can also be enjoyed to the hilt. Rauh once described to an interviewer the moment, during the Democratic Convention credentials fight in 1964, when he felt the full consolidated force of those arrayed against the MFDP: "You had the whole Democratic political machine, the President, the whole White House, and the whole labor movement, all trying to stop a few little Mississippi negroes and me from making a little stink at the Democratic Convention." Those opponents, of course, included many of Rauh's closest allies and colleagues (and in the case of Walter Reuther, a key patron). Before those allies' familiar refrain of caution and strategic restraint, Rauh might have acquiesced, or he might have grown bitter. Rauh did neither. "Everyone says this took a lot of courage and principle," Rauh recalled, "but I don't think anybody realized how much fun this was, to really get into a real battle like this, to have troops and to have a real fight with all the power."</p>
<p>That was Joe Rauh. Once more into the breach.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 06 Dec 2010 12:54:55 +0000149039 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldFrustrated by His Own Partyhttp://prospect.org/article/frustrated-his-own-party-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><b>Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought To Change the Democratic Party</b>, <i>By Susan Dunn, Harvard University Press, 361 pages, $27.95</i> </p>
<p>For Democrats during the past two years, control of both the presidency and Congress has presented at once the ultimate partisan prize and the ultimate source of aggravation. In theory, Barack Obama should have been able to carry out his policies. In practice, he has been hobbled not only by the GOP's use of the Senate filibuster but also by the Blue Dogs in his own party. In search of congressional seats in 2006 and 2008, Democrats fielded candidates that fit the politics of more conservative areas, and bigger tents always make for more fractious coalitions. </p>
<p>Liberals currently experiencing an unhappy education in the frustrations of presidential leadership might take comfort in knowing that even the greatest Democratic president of all confronted the same problem and was unable to overcome it. But he tried what Obama does not dare attempt -- to defeat more conservative Democrats in their home states.</p>
<p>Franklin D. Roosevelt began his "fireside chat" on June 24, 1938, as he had begun others, recounting New Deal battles won and lost during the most recent congressional session. But he ended the broadcast with a surprise. "And now," the president intoned, "I want to say a few words about the coming political primaries." In this midterm primary season, he said, "there will be many clashes between two schools of thought, generally classified as liberal and conservative." Roosevelt insisted that, as "head of the Democratic Party," charged with carrying out "the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform," he had an obligation to speak out about primary contests involving such a clash. Thus did Roosevelt announce a political gambit not attempted by any president since: active and personal intervention in key primary contests, not only to protect liberals but to replace conservatives. The press branded the effort a "purge," and the name stuck. </p>
<p>As Susan Dunn emphasizes in <i>Roosevelt's Purge</i>, her lively narrative of that vexed campaign, FDR was motivated not merely by personal pique and short-term legislative goals but by a vision of a refashioned party system. He explained in that extraordinary fireside chat that primaries should facilitate a "healthy choice" between the two parties in November, for "an election cannot give the country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as peas in the same pod." According to Dunn, Roosevelt "believed that the nation should have two effective and responsible parties, one liberal and the other conservative." Since the president attempted to accomplish in one frenzied summer what six decades of subsequent developments only haltingly produced, it's perhaps no surprise that the effort failed. But what an exciting failure! </p>
<p>Dunn ably sets the context for the purge attempt, highlighting Roosevelt's legislative struggles during his second term. A nascent conservative coalition, galvanized by the defeat of Roosevelt's court-packing plan in 1937, went on to delay passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act and kill FDR's executive-reorganization bill outright the following year. Virginia Democrat Harry Byrd met with conservative senators in both parties to plot anti-New Deal strategy and draw up a 10-point conservative manifesto. The powerful House Rules Committee chair, John O'Connor, lived to scuttle New Deal bills, mocking beneficiaries of federal programs who "go to the public trough to be fed." The Democratic troublemakers in FDR's second term make Obama's Blue Dogs look like pups in comparison. </p>
<p>Roosevelt was slow to turn toward ideological party-building in response. The famously pragmatic politician had specialized in strange-bedfellow and bipartisan alliances during his first term, an approach befitting both the economic emergency and an existing party system that was ideologically scrambled to an extent almost unfathomable today. But his second-term travails gradually convinced Roosevelt to leverage his popularity on behalf of a purge campaign, to be overseen by an "elimination committee" of aggressive liberal advisers including Harold Ickes, Tommy Corcoran, and Harry Hopkins.</p>
<p>Dunn, a professor of humanities at Williams College, is at her best detailing the specific races FDR engaged that summer. Tracing his crisscrossing train trips throughout the country, she vividly captures the old-time popular <i>festiveness</i> that still permeated politics in the 1930s -- the crowds of thousands waiting at every station, the president's back-of-the-train speeches, the intrigue attending each of his strategic slights, snubs, embraces, and endorsements of local politicos. </p>
<p>The purge's targets make for an interesting cast. The flamboyant "Cotton Ed" Smith of South Carolina was a prototypical Southern racial demagogue, while Maryland's plutocratic Sen. Millard Tydings was an icier, altogether more relentless opponent of the president's agenda in Congress. ("Take Tydings' hide off and rub salt on it," a vengeful Roosevelt told Ickes.) The most dramatic confrontation of all came in Georgia. Before an August crowd of 40,000, Roosevelt explicitly repudiated the senior senator Walter George and endorsed his primary opponent -- while the incumbent sat on stage just a few feet away. A remarkable photo, reproduced in Dunn's book, captures George staring thoughtfully ahead as the president lowers the boom.</p>
<p>Dunn's account also conveys the notable <i>non</i>-Southern Democratic resistance FDR faced. Conservative coalition leaders included Democratic senators from Missouri, Indiana, and Connecticut, and one of the purge's top targets, the irascible John O'Connor, was a Tammany-backed Manhattan pol. The O'Connor fight underscores the degree to which Roosevelt's 1938 bid for programmatic partisan coherence was an assault not merely on conservative elements in the "Solid South" but on core features of the traditional American party system itself -- the patchworks of state and local machines, the nonideological ties of group, section, and interest. </p>
<p>The ambition of the effort was matched only by its utter failure. Of the purge's top targets, only O'Connor lost his primary contest, while several liberal incumbents FDR supported went down to defeat. What went wrong? Dunn emphasizes the disorganized, ad hoc quality of the effort. Moreover, the electorate's aversion to outside meddling in local politics proved potent. (Gallup polls that summer showed that about three-fourths of Georgians supported the president, and about three-fourths opposed his intervention in their Democratic primary.) </p>
<p>Then there was race. Practically speaking, efforts to liberalize the Southern Democratic Party stood little chance without African American electoral support, scarce in the Jim Crow South and virtually nonexistent in the region's Democratic primaries. More fundamentally, subsequent events would show that the very ideological realignment FDR sought to bring about through an intraparty battle over the New Deal required the party's adoption of an aggressive civil-rights policy. And that was decidedly not part of Roosevelt's plan. </p>
<p>The purge did, however, help set the terms of liberal Democrats' partisan agenda in the postwar decades. The liberals would battle Southern conservatives for party control while pushing for congressional reforms to empower partisan and majoritarian policy-making. Moreover, they would articulate an intellectual case for programmatic national parties able to break the "deadlock of democracy," to use a term coined by Dunn's Williams colleague, James MacGregor Burns. Dunn's analysis of the purge's legacy is cut from Burnsian cloth. In a whirlwind final chapter, she traces the evolution of American parties "From the Purge to Realignment," showing how the politics of race and Southern economic development propelled a national electoral reconfiguration and produced by century's end the very ideologically sorted parties that Roosevelt had envisioned. FDR, Dunn insists, would be pleased with this development.</p>
<p>Yet virtually no one is happy with the current state of American politics -- certainly not liberals who have watched Obama's legislative agenda stall before uniform Republican opposition and key Democratic defections. In a rather jarring analytical turn at the end of her book, Dunn acknowledges that discontent and blames it on the mismatch between the new American party system and old American political institutions -- a "horse-and-buggy political system" that fragments authority and enables minority obstruction. Her only suggested remedy, short of turning American government into a parliamentary system through constitutional reform, is to double down on party discipline and concerted presidential partisanship. </p>
<p>I happen to sympathize with this vision, but it runs against the grain of widely held American beliefs, and Dunn can scarcely mount a convincing argument for it in a few rushed pages. Indeed, an irony of our partisan age is that the intellectual case <i>for</i> polarization and party discipline is less understood and less endorsed now than it was in the year of Roosevelt's failed purge. Dunn's engrossing book at least does us the favor of recovering that case's noble early lineage.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:38:16 +0000148991 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldGROVER NORQUIST'S EERIE PRESCIENCE.http://prospect.org/article/grover-norquists-eerie-prescience
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>GROVER NORQUIST'S EERIE PRESCIENCE.</strong> Today in <em>The Washington Post</em>, <strong>Grover Norquist</strong> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/13/AR2007081300907.html?hpid=opinionsbox1">argues</a> not only that "<strong>Karl Rove</strong> changed history," but that his vision "of the modern Republican Party as the dominant governing power" will "come sooner for his life and work." (Norquist implies that the Democrats' current hubristic overreach during their brief moment in the majority will itself help to usher in "a conservative Republican majority in Congress to last a generation," just a bit later than Rove had anticipated.)</p>
<p>Norquist, because he's a master of the deadpan, deliberately blunt maximalist pronouncement, has always been my favorite bad prognosticator. Most political commentators, of course, are terrible at predictions, but few make them with Norquist's gusto. Recall his <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.norquist.html">contribution</a> to <em>The Washington Monthly</em>'s September 2004 "What If <strong>Bush</strong> Wins?" roundtable:</p>
<blockquote><p> The modern Democratic Party cannot survive the reelection of President George W. Bush and another four years of Republican control of both Congress and the White House.</p>
<p>No brag. Just fact.</p></blockquote>
<p>(True, Grover can weasel out of this prediction given that the Republicans lost control of Congress two years later rather than four, but still.) Norquist made quite a case:</p>
<blockquote><p>Other shifts in national policy will also occur. Abroad, four more years under President Bush will move America and the world towards greater free trade, spreading prosperity throughout the world and bringing more countries into the trading systems that require property rights and rule of law, draining the swamps that breed radicalism and terror. At home, a second Bush administration will permanently abolish the death tax, which not only threatens to confiscate up to half of your parents' lifetime earnings, but also leads to the creation of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations that inevitably are taken over by liberal bureaucrats. And a steady increase in the number of honest gun owners will continue to reduce street crime and make America safer … Less crime means fewer prison guards and parole officers, shrinking the government workforce which tends to be 10 percent more Democrat and less Republican …</p></blockquote>
<p>But that's not all:</p>
<blockquote><p>Four more years of President Bush will also accelerate one of the most important demographic changes in America over the past 20 years: the number of Americans who own stock. In 1980, only 20 percent of adults owned stocks in mutual funds, 40lks, IRAs and direct contribution pensions. Today, that number is over 60 percent and growing. Bush wants to create Retirement Savings Accounts to allow every American to sock away up to $5,000 for retirement tax-free; similarly, the president has proposed Lifetime Savings Accounts allowing Americans to save $7,500 for education, housing, or health costs during their working lives … Four more years of more and bigger individual retirement accounts, heath savings accounts, RSAs, and LSAs means four more years of more Republicans and fewer Democrats.</p></blockquote>
<p>As <strong>Chris Suellentrop</strong> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2085277/">noted</a> back in 2003, Norquist has been forecasting the coming permanent Republican majority for <em>over twenty years</em>. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, it was a slightly more specific prediction of Norquist's, aimed at an audience of disaffected small-government conservatives, that's my all-time favorite. It came in a February 2004 article in <em>The American Spectator</em> entitled <a href="http://www.atr.org/content/pdf/2004/feb/030404SpectatorArticle.pdf">"The Second Term Diet: Tired of out-of-control government spending? Then re-elect the President and his reform agenda"</a> (PDF). Norquist duly noted the uncomfortable reality that government spending rose under basically unified GOP rule during Bush's first term, but he laid out six reforms we could confidently expect from a second-term <strong>Bush</strong> administration that would lead to smaller government: privatization of the civil service, military base closings, Social Security privatization, the new Doha round of trade negotiations (which would result in the U.S. cutting its farm subsidies), Health Savings Accounts ("The more Americans pay for their own health care directly, the more competition will lower health care costs for all Americans"), and the initiation and expansion of "school choice" programs. There were, of course, at least three different levels on which these predictions were erroneous (the specific predictions themselves, Norquist's logical and causal assumptions about their relationship to the size of government, etc.). But if you're going to make bad prognostications, you might as well do it ambitiously. </p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:36:40 +0000192311 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldREMEMBER THE DISASTROUS FOREIGN POLICY DOCTRINE AND ALL THE DEAD PEOPLE.http://prospect.org/article/remember-disastrous-foreign-policy-doctrine-and-all-dead-people
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>REMEMBER THE DISASTROUS FOREIGN POLICY DOCTRINE AND ALL THE DEAD PEOPLE.</strong> The much-hyped <strong>Matt Scully</strong> <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200709/michael-gerson">takedown</a> of his old colleague, former <strong>Bush</strong> speech-writer-turned <em>WaPo</em> columnist and Council on Foreign Relations fellow <strong>Michael Gerson</strong> (not, alas, available in full to non-subscribers), offers a hilarious, gossipy portrait of an apparently shameless (and heretofore effective) credit-hog and self-promoter, though I think its relevance to a substantive take on Gerson (or Scully) one way or the other is basically nil. It's great fun, after all, to watch guys fighting over credit for something like the "Axis of Evil" line, but at this late date in the steaming wreckage that is the Bush presidency it's also kind of appalling, and the important thing to keep in mind is of course the policy disasters for which all these people bear some responsibility and for which the president (whom Scully still seems to love) bears the most responsibility of all. </p>
<p>As for Gerson and his current posts as a D.C. establishment-approved expert and pundit, his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gerson">bio</a> <em>does</em> list some past jobs besides speechwriter, as a policy aide/advisor to <strong>Bush</strong> and other Republicans as well as an editor at <em>U.S. News and World Report</em>. His foreign-policy expertise may have, um, failed him at times in his capacity as a speechwriter, as in the case of the lines he originally wrote (according to Scully) for the president to deliver on the USS Abraham Lincoln under the "Mission Accomplished" banner on May 1, 2003:</p>
<blockquote><p>The sirens of Baghdad are quiet. The desert has returned to silence. The Battle of Iraq is over, and the United States and our allies have prevailed.</p></blockquote>
<p>According to Scully, the two people who flagged these lines as overstated and said they should be cut were <strong>Karen Hughes</strong> and <strong>Don Rumsfeld</strong>.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:53:51 +0000192272 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldTHE IRAN CONNECTION.http://prospect.org/article/iran-connection
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>THE IRAN CONNECTION.</strong> <a href="http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/08/iran-and-bombs.html"><strong>Ezra</strong></a> and <a href="http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/interrogations.php"><strong>Matt</strong></a> express skepticism about the new <strong>Michael Gordon</strong>-penned <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/world/middleeast/08military.html?ex=1344225600&amp;en=e3974bad086516f0&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss">piece</a> on Iran's supply of bombs used against U.S. troops in Iraq. <strong>Gareth Porter</strong> <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_iran_attack_that_wasnt">has written</a> recently about another such story of Iranian meddling that rested on pretty thin evidence.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:30:55 +0000192260 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldIVO DAALDER.http://prospect.org/article/ivo-daalder
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>IVO DAALDER.</strong> <strong>Jon Chait</strong> <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/the_plank?pid=132274">links</a> to this <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501056.html">op-ed</a> by <strong>Robert Kagan</strong> and <strong>Ivo Daalder</strong> proposing a "Concert of Democracies" to lend legitimacy to American interventions. <strong>Matt</strong> <a href="http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/the_view_from_beijing.php">raises</a> some compelling objections to the notion, but the broader merits of the concept aside, this from Chait caught my attention: "[The op-ed is] interesting not so much for what it says but for who says it. The co-authors are neoconservative Robert Kagan and liberal (<em>Iraq war opponent</em> and former Howard Dean supporter) Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution." [<em>italics added</em>]</p>
<p>Daalder was, like many many many center-left foreign policy establishment types, pretty cautious in his public commentary in the run-up to the Iraq war. But he did sign this March 19, 2003 <a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraq-20030319.htm">Project for a New American Century letter</a>, the first sentence of which reads: "Although some of us have disagreed with the administration's handling of Iraq policy and others of us have agreed with it, we all join in supporting the military intervention in Iraq." This seems like ... I dunno, tepid opposition. It is true that he was an advisor to the <strong>Dean</strong> campaign, only to jump off the bus in early 2004 and commence <a href="http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040223&amp;s=foer022304">talking smack</a> about the candidate along with other Brookings colleagues. But since one longstanding theme of Daalder's commentary in the last several years has been to argue that <a href="http://www.brook.edu/views/articles/daalder/20070616.htm">neoconservatism shouldn't be blamed for the Iraq war</a>, it's somewhat less surprising to see him co-authoring pieces with a neoconservative. I don't raise these points to engage in the kind of ad hominem attacks for which Chait <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/the_plank?pid=130577">faulted</a> liberals regarding their critiques of last week's <strong>O'Hanlon-Pollack</strong> op-ed -- just to quibble with Chait's notion that this op-ed is "interesting not so much for what it says but for who says it."</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 06 Aug 2007 18:40:40 +0000192239 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldELEVATING THE DISCUSSION.http://prospect.org/article/elevating-discussion
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>ELEVATING THE DISCUSSION.</strong> The AP's <strong>David Yepsen</strong> <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/giuliani-takes-a-slap-and-gets-it-back/">did indeed</a> get in a quick acerbic dig at yesterday's GOP presidential debate after <strong>Rudy Giuliani</strong> said his plan to rebuild America's infrastructure would be to cut taxes. It didn't seem like it registered among any of the contenders, though. Giuliani's answer typified the rock-hard commitment to vacuous conservative nostrums and inane dogma that the candidates have ably maintained in debate after debate. I keep waiting to see that commitment break somewhere, sometime, from one of these guys (<strong>Ron Paul</strong> excepted), but it hasn't happened. Two more wearying examples: <strike><strong>John McCain</strong></strike> <strong>Mitt Romney</strong>'s <em>[ed]</em> non-sequitur "have you forgotten 9/11?" <a href="http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/ron_paul_is_making_sense.php">retort</a> to Paul's riff on the Iraq war supporters' track record, and <em>all</em> the candidates ramblings about "market-based" solutions to health care ("Let’s get back to freedom," suggested <strong>Duncan Hunter</strong>). I certainly couldn't share <strong>Isaac Chotiner</strong>'s <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/the_plank?pid=132185">relatively upbeat take</a> on the debate. </p>
<p>What's most frustrating are, still, the evasions and myopia on Iraq, particularly on the part of the frontrunners. (See the debate transcript <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/us/politics/05transcript-debate.html?pagewanted=all">here</a>.) Aside from a couple predictable references to the <strong>O'Hanlon</strong>-<strong>Pollack</strong> op-ed, what continues to be most striking in the candidates' comments on the war and related foreign policy issues is the swift resort to abstraction and highfalutin Big-Think -- lots of discussion of the world-historical 21st century struggle against global jihadism and the need to pull people into modernity and to stand up for Western civilization, etc. Because people who are committed to opposing a real change in direction in Iraq -- this includes <strong>Romney</strong>, Giuliani, and McCain, though not <strong>Sam Brownback</strong> or (of course) Paul -- can't really discuss the specifics of the war or the state of the country, they instead must elevate the discussion to an absurdly high level of moronic strategic "theory." They end up sounding like <strong>Samuel Huntington</strong> after a bout of head trauma.</p>
<p>Kudos to <strong>Tommy Thompson</strong>, though, for pointing out that <strong>Tom Tancredo</strong>'s proposal to fight the War on Terror by bombing Mecca might be a bad idea.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 06 Aug 2007 18:02:17 +0000192236 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldTNR LIIIIIIIES! Michelle...http://prospect.org/article/tnr-liiiiiiies-michelle
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong><em>TNR</em> LIIIIIIIES!</strong> <strong>Michelle Malkin</strong> and co. vindicated re. <strong>Beauchamp</strong>gate! <a href="http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070730&amp;s=editorial080207">Or, perhaps not...</a></p>
<p>Special bonus salaciousness <a href="http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/08/tnr_critic_turns_out_to_be_som.html">here</a>.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> <strong>Eventheliberal Scott Lemieux</strong> <a href="http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2007/08/no-glass-here.html">concedes</a> that his initial suspicions of <strong>Stephen Glass</strong> redux were wrong.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 02 Aug 2007 21:55:05 +0000192205 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldPROFILES IN COURAGE.http://prospect.org/article/profiles-courage
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>PROFILES IN COURAGE.</strong> <a href="http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/give_it_a_couple_of_months.php"><strong>Matt</strong></a> and <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_08/011795.php"><strong>Kevin Drum</strong></a> disagree a bit about the plausibility of the scenario <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/the_plank?pid=130989">outlined to <strong>Mike Crowley</strong></a> by Mystery Republican Senator X:</p>
<blockquote><p>On Iraq, this senator said he expects that, come September and the Petraeus-Crocker report, the White House will announce "a transition to a new approach." He thinks that will involve a non-trivial drawdown of troops, and a returned emphasis to training Iraqi forces, though he wasn't too clear beyond that. He also said such a shift would head off any possible collapse in congressional GOP support for the war.</p></blockquote>
<p>It's true both, as Matt says, that this troop drawdown is unlikely and, as Kevin says, that even if it <em>were</em> true it would be pretty incoherent and unserious of the GOP to sign off on the change in approach. </p>
<p>The central point to take away from Crowley's interview is -- to be uncharitable about it -- just simply that Republicans won't under any conceivable circumstances rise up and oppose the president's war policy next month, notwithstanding the inexplicably persistent press hype of a coming "mutiny." <strong>Petraeus</strong> can issue a happy-face report and advocate sustaining the surge, or he can put forth a bogus and incoherent "transition to a new approach" (one that still involves sustaining the occupation indefinitely), and the Republicans will go along with it just as they have gone along with the president's war policy for the last four years. The usual "thoughtful" GOP suspects -- <strong>John Warner</strong>, <strong>Dick Lugar</strong>, et al. -- will, as always, disappoint those expecting a real break with the president. I would love to be proven wrong, but past precedent and the general thrust of this senator's comments to Crowley don't give me any reason to expect it. It's worth keeping in mind that the leading GOP presidential hopefuls <a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=08&amp;year=2007&amp;base_name=post_4443#017463">moved</a> <em>instantly</em> this week from a policy of saying nothing substantive about Iraq at all to shouting to the heavens about <strong>O'Hanlon</strong> and <strong>Pollack</strong>'s op-ed and how it proves that victory is imminent. There genuinely does not appear to be an inclination among significant GOP leaders to challenge the president's war policy significantly. </p>
<p>Indeed, <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/the_plank?pid=130989">these few short paraphrased comments</a> uttered to Crowley offer a perfect encapsulation of Republicans' current state of intellectual and strategic listlessness and bankruptcy. Beyond reconfirming his party's inclination to help Bush kick the war can down the road some more, what did our mystery senator point to as a key issue for his party? "Earmark transparency." </p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 02 Aug 2007 19:12:48 +0000192202 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldWHO'S DODGING THE ISSUE?http://prospect.org/article/whos-dodging-issue
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>WHO'S DODGING THE ISSUE?</strong> <strong>Robert Samuelson</strong> is <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/31/AR2007073101625.html">furious</a> at the country's think tanks for dodging the great question of the era: How the aging of the Boomers is going to require drastic and painful transformations in the American welfare state. He not only pulls the old trick of grouping "Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid" together when the programs actually face very different respective budget outlooks -- he explicitly complains that Social Security and Medicare "are usually treated separately" in think tank analyses, while "the larger questions of adjusting to an aging society are mostly evaded." </p>
<p><strong>Dean Baker</strong> <a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=08&amp;year=2007&amp;base_name=samuelson_attacks_social_secur#017456">helpfully explains</a> to Samuelson that the major cause of the projected increase in these programs' costs is the rapidly rising cost of health care rather than the aging of the population as such; and thus the intensive discussions we've been seeing in the country regarding health care reform actually do address the country's central budget problem. Maybe Samuelson won't be so mad anymore.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 01 Aug 2007 17:06:27 +0000192188 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldWANKERY'S POWER.http://prospect.org/article/wankerys-power
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>WANKERY'S POWER.</strong> The <em>Times</em>'s campaign blog provides a nice illustration of just what kind of a political impact an op-ed like <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fContributors"><strong>Michael O'Hanlon</strong> and <strong>Ken Pollack</strong>'s</a> can have, regardless of whether or not <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html?hp">headlines just keep coming</a> of continuous carnage in Iraq and ever-worsening news regarding the very political dynamic the surge was intended to improve. <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/from-iraq-to-the-campaign-trail/">Writes</a> <strong>Marc Santora</strong>:</p>
<blockquote><p>For months, Rudolph W. Giuliani mainly chose to speak about the Iraq war only in passing, or when asked to comment on a specific event or issue like President Bush’s troop buildup.</p>
<p>(He has yet to agree to repeated requests from the Times to sit down for at least an hour to discuss the war and its complexities in depth. Senator John McCain and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton have already done so.)</p>
<p>He has said that there is too much focus on Iraq, preferring instead to talk about the threats of terrorism in general. Not so on a swing through New Hampshire this week.</p>
<p>After the publication of an Op-Ed article in The Times on Monday suggesting that the military’s shift in strategy is showing significant signs of improving the situation on the ground in Iraq where American soldiers have focused their attention, Mr. Giuliani joined the chorus of politicians and conservative pundits pointing to the article as evidence of the folly of Democrats pushing to find a way out of the war sooner rather than later. ...</p>
<p>“Wouldn’t it be a heck of a time to pull out,” Mr. Giuliani said, citing the piece, “if we were actually succeeding?”</p>
<p>That thought, rebounding across the conservative spectrum, seems to have galvanized Republicans once again on Iraq. (Vice President Cheney mentioned the article tonight in an interview on CNN.)</p></blockquote>
<p>That kind of impact was, of course, utterly predictable; it helps explain why us ultra-partisan unserious lefty blogger types reacted rather strongly to the op-ed. Meanwhile, <strong>Michael Cohen</strong> at <strong>Democracy Arsenal</strong> <a href="http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2007/07/the-trouble-wit.html">makes the main point</a> very well: The goal of the surge was to provide a context for an improvement in the political situation. Absolutely no progress has been made on that front. Quite the contrary, in fact, as we see again today with the news of a major Sunni Arab political bloc's withdrawal from the <strong>Maliki</strong> government.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 01 Aug 2007 16:46:35 +0000192187 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldMOVIE PLUG.http://prospect.org/article/movie-plug
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>MOVIE PLUG.</strong> I'll second what <strong>Matt</strong> <a href="http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/no_end_in_sight_1.php">said</a> about <strong>Charles Ferguson</strong>'s new documentary about the first year of the American occupation of Iraq, <a href="http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/"><em>No End in Sight</em></a>. I think the very structure of the film -- focusing on and portraying the initial missteps in the first phase of the occupation as avoidable but decisive turning points that doomed any future efforts -- along with the implication of various points emphasized throughout basically make the film an incompetence narrative of the war, which I <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_incompetence_dodge">resist</a>. But it's nevertheless an amazingly effective, absorbing, and intelligent film, and the mendacity and incompetence that it documents are of course real enough, and endlessly nauseating. </p>
<p>Most importantly, I think, the film avoids the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality of many political documentaries (including many good ones) that have proliferated during the <strong>Bush</strong> years, where various critiques of the administration can get piled on in not-quite-coherent fashion. <em>No End in Sight</em>, by contrast, is a movie with a very coherent narrative to tell and charge to make; I think its story is incomplete, and, in a few respects, not quite right, but it's devastating nonetheless. See the movie if you can.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:15:14 +0000192170 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldSCOTUS PUTS THE...http://prospect.org/article/scotus-puts
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>SCOTUS PUTS THE FIX IN ON PRICES (<em>JARED BERNSTEIN</em>).</strong> Yesterday, the free-marketeers on the Supreme Court <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/business/28cnd-bizcourt.html?ex=1340769600&amp;en=0b4c106d96a846ae&amp;ei=5088&amp;partner=rssnyt&amp;emc=rss">signed off</a> on a plan to fix prices. It's a strange thing when those who usually argue for an unfettered invisible hand reach for the handcuffs, so let's spend a few minutes unpacking this one.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:46:39 +0000191840 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldAFTER CHENEY.http://prospect.org/article/after-cheney
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>AFTER CHENEY.</strong> Don't miss, over at <strong>LGM</strong>, <strong>Rob</strong>'s <a href="http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2007/06/thoughts-on-darth-cheney.html">thoughts</a> on <strong>Dick Cheney</strong>'s power and bureaucratic effectiveness as documented so amply this week in <em>The Washington Post</em>'s justly-praised <a href="http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/?hpid=topnews">series</a>. "He's a bastard, but within the narrow confines of negotiating and navigating government bureaucracy, he's a magnificent bastard," writes Rob. "Perhaps inevitably, it occurs to me to wonder 'what if he were our bastard?'"</p>
<p>Rob ends up answering his own question with a "no," and does a good job distilling the basic unavoidable problems a Cheneyesque approach to governance and policy-making entails regardless of the person's substantive and ideological beliefs. From a slightly different angle -- not so much regarding Cheney's specific bureaucratic approach as regarding his unprecedentedly outsized and ideologically hard-edged role as a partner-in-power of the president -- <strong>Alex Rossmiller</strong> <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=wanted_a_liberal_dick_cheney">recently argued on our site</a> that liberals <em>should</em> in fact want a <strong>Dick Cheney</strong> of their own as vice president.</p>
<p>Certainly a question that hasn't gotten enough attention is what Cheney's lasting effect on the the vice presidency will turn out to have been in the presidential administrations to come -- how transformative and paradigm-shifting his tenure really is, what factors might contribute to or mitigate the office's continued growth in power, etc.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:07:45 +0000191835 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldDEMS ARE MORE TRUSTED IN WORLD WAR AGAINST ISLAMOFASCISM.http://prospect.org/article/dems-are-more-trusted-world-war-against-islamofascism
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>DEMS ARE MORE TRUSTED IN WORLD WAR AGAINST ISLAMOFASCISM.</strong> <strong>Greg Sargent</strong> is <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/014895.php">right</a>, <a href="http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/jun/28/fox_poll_more_americans_trust_dems_to_handle_world_war_iii_against_islamofascists">this </a> is a truly egregious question in the latest FOX News poll but also a pretty telling result.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 28 Jun 2007 22:35:34 +0000191832 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldSEATTLE AND LOUISVILLE....http://prospect.org/article/seattle-and-louisville
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>SEATTLE AND LOUISVILLE.</strong> As expected, in another 5-4 decision the Supreme Court <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Schools-Race.html?hp">struck down</a> two public school integration plans in Seattle and Louisville. We're going to be running extensive coverage of this today and tomorrow, but for now, see <a href="http://scotusblog.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/05-908.pdf">here</a> (PDF) for the full decision. </p>
<p>Speaking of school integration, <strong>John Derbyshire</strong> offers some thoughtful comments <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDlhZTBhNzhlNzVmY2Q1OTlhODVlNGEwNjVjNzQxMzk=">here</a>.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:06:18 +0000191823 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldCARD-CHECKED.http://prospect.org/article/card-checked
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>CARD-CHECKED.</strong> The Employee Free Choice Act <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/06/27/MNGL7QM87M1.DTL">died</a> in the Senate yesterday by a vote of 51-48 -- nine votes short of what would be needed for cloture. Today, <em>New York Times</em> economics writer <strong>David Leonhardt</strong> has a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/business/27leonhardt.html?ex=1340596800&amp;en=7a15c47e4d4ce5e6&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss">hand-wringy piece</a> that both sides with card-check's opponents in their argument that the process is illegitimate because it doesn't involve a secret ballot, but also laments the longterm decline of organized labor in the United States and its impact on rising inequality. <strong>Dean Baker</strong> <a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=06&amp;year=2007&amp;base_name=leonhardt_misses_the_story_on#comments">makes two points in response</a> (also see his commenters). It would have been nice to see Leonhardt specify what <em>other</em> measures he'd like to see implemented that could curb antiunion attacks from business and boost unions' prospects for organizing workers who would, all things equal, like to be organized. <strong>Harold</strong> wrote about the Employee Free Choice Act last week <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=card_checks_reality_check">here</a>, while <strong>Dmitri Iglitzin</strong> laid out some other labor law reform proposals beyond card-check last month <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=beyond_card_check">here</a>.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:42:07 +0000191817 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldNOT JUST ACTS OF COMMISSION.http://prospect.org/article/not-just-acts-commission
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>NOT JUST ACTS OF COMMISSION.</strong> The chief prosecutor in the DoD's Office of Military Commissions took to the <em>New York Times</em> op-ed page today to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/opinion/26davis.html?pagewanted=1">defend</a> conditions in Guantanamo Bay and the integrity of the military commissions process for detainees there: "Guantánamo Bay is a clean, safe and humane place for enemy combatants," <strong>Morris D. David</strong> concludes, "and the Military Commissions Act provides a fair process to adjudicate the guilt or innocence of those alleged to have committed crimes."</p>
<p>I think others could do a more thorough job engaging Davis's substantive defense of the commissions, but one point <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_the_military_commissions_obscure_gitmos_real_purpose">made on our site</a> recently by <strong>Jonathan Hafetz</strong> is, I think, crucial to keep in mind as we get tangled in arguments about the commissions process and what might possibly be done to improve them: Namely, most detainees <em>are never going to face a military commission at all</em>. As Hafetz wrote,</p>
<blockquote><p>The president created military commissions two months after September 11 as part of his "new paradigm." The administration claimed that the commissions provided the necessary speed and flexibility to bring suspected terrorists to justice. These were attributes, the administration argued, that criminal trials in civilian courts lacked. The expectation was that most detainees taken to Guantanamo would be quickly charged and convicted.</p>
<p>But within months, the administration realized that it did not have the evidence to charge, let alone convict, most Guantanamo detainees of anything. As Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg, a member of the original military prosecution team, told the press, "It became obvious to us as we reviewed the evidence that, in many cases, we had simply gotten the slowest guys on the battlefield. We literally found guys who had been shot in the butt."</p>
<p>So, the administration changed gears, turning Guantanamo into a permanent system of indefinite detention. In more than five years, only ten of the seven hundred individuals detained at Guantanamo have even been charged before military commissions, and no trial has taken place ...</p>
<p>Since the MCA's passage in October, only three detainees have been put before military commissions. The first, David Hicks, pled guilty in March, in a nakedly political deal widely denounced as a travesty. Hicks -- once described as a dangerous terrorist -- was returned to Australia, where he will serve an additional nine months before being freed. Trials for the other two detainees, Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan, were halted by last week's rulings.</p></blockquote>
<p>Those rulings hinged on a fundamental discrepancy between the standards for the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) that determine who can be detained and those for the military commissions (the former has a looser definition for "enemy combatant" than the latter). That paradox pertains to all of the hundreds of Gitmo detainees, and it's obvious that for most of them, no military commission of any kind (no matter how flawed) will take place; they will simply be detained indefinitely, or until a new administration completely revamps the U.S.'s policies.</p>
<blockquote><p>The open-ended and undefined nature of the "war on terror" also has significant practical implications for Guantanamo. It means that the administration has no incentive to try people, since its evidence -- in many cases weak or non-existent -- would be exposed to greater scrutiny. Instead, it can simply hold people forever by branding them "enemy combatants" through a sham CSRT process that relies on secret evidence, denies detainees lawyers, and relies on information gained through torture.</p></blockquote>
<p>A focus on the admittedly abominable military commissions is thus, in many ways, a red herring.</p>
<p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 26 Jun 2007 19:39:41 +0000191804 at http://prospect.orgSam RosenfeldFRIDAY SEERSUCKING. Via...http://prospect.org/article/friday-seersucking
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><strong>FRIDAY SEERSUCKING.</strong> Via <a href="http://www.thecapitolist.com"><strong>The Capitolist</strong></a>, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/photo/070621/480/859207dcf91b4cb2947b946695a51b24">this</a> is certainly the jollyist context in which I've ever seen <strong>Ted Stevens</strong>, though he looks pretty pissed even here.<br /><img src="http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20070621/capt.859207dcf91b4cb2947b946695a51b24.seersucker_dclb114.jpg?x=380&amp;y=251&amp;sig=CJJ6oERmtjajIi41TnNfIA--" /></p><p><em>--Sam Rosenfeld</em></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 22 Jun 2007 20:44:06 +0000191783 at http://prospect.orgSam Rosenfeld